So, having nothing better to do with my time until Pandageddon and poking around for Something Else To Do On The Netherweb, I came across a free 14-day trial of EVE Online. I’ve only heard a few things about it, though a guildie did tell me that “EVE’s the kind of game that every MMO player needs to experience, if only to see how a toxic community can obliterate an otherwise excellent game.”

So I tried it. And because I did, you don’t have to.

First, let me get something out of the way. People tell you how hard EVE Online is. They tell you that the learning curve is brutal. They post links to pics like this one:

LOOK HOW HARD IT IS! LIKE REALLY, REALLY HARD!

Well, here’s the secret: It’s really not.

The tutorials aren’t as friendly as WoW’s are, but if you go through them carefully and pay attention, you’ll have the basic skills down solid. Read the mission text, do what they tell you to, realize that the game is based around skills not levels or items, and use the in-game web browser to Google where your understanding of the tutorials fail. Then, Arthas help you, you can ask for help in the Rookie Help Chat channel, where one brave, helpful ISD volunteer will help you and four or five or twenty other players will mock you with bigoted epithets.

True story: They told me the game time was set to GMT so that people could coordinate fleets, and asked me if I owned a clock. Well, I do. And I’ll bet the people that coordinate fleets own clocks, too.

I really enjoyed playing. Here’s my character, Korobase Aulx-Gao:

So fresh and innocent…yet, she already has the thousand-yard-stare down. What horrors have you seen, Koro?

CANNOT UNSEE

Even kinda derping around, I learned to keep an eye on the certificates – which have no other purpose than to give you some idea of how to prioritize your skills (and isn’t that enough?). I learned that there were four factions, and I put my time in helping out the least objectionable factions and corporations and avoiding the rest. I learned to avoid anyone whose name came up yellow or red on my overview unless they were in a shuttle or a pod. And that took me about two days.

About the “hardest” thing to do is use scan probes (basically satellites) to scan a system for anomalies, which can lead to various kinds of goodies. Once you get that you can use more than one probe at once, and the more probes you have getting a signal from whatever-it-is the better chance you have of finding it, the task moves from “difficult” to “tedious”. And this is the part of the game the game company put a supplemental tutorial on YouTube for! Look, I get this, and I live in a quasi-medieval culture where “orbit” is where you go when you listen to a goblin when he says “Here, hold this a minute. I’m sure I’ve got it working.”

So what the game like? The game, itself, is pretty fun. Skills are everything in EVE Online – proper skill advancement can let you use bigger ships, get more damage out of the ship you have – even use equipment that you couldn’t use at lower skills due to power and CPU constraints. You can start as any of the factions, and learn to use any of the other factions’ ships as well as your own. There’s a lot of combat, both against NPC pirates (or “rats”) and other PC gankers/griefers (or “assholes”) but that’s not the only path to success in EVE Online. You can improve your mining skills and be able to make a decent amount of money getting raw materials for industrialists within a few days of starting.

This graphic shows the things that you can do in Eve Online. Notice how many of them involve ruining someone else’s day (or in the case of wrecking player-owned stations for lulz and profit, wrecking someone else’s year). Yeah.

The other thing my guildie said was “EVE is so big that it could probably support 10x the playerbase and still be pretty spacious. Even in this environment, the griefers have still turned it into a murdering and corrupt series of kleptocracies only tolerated because its too late for change.” And with that, I think she nailed it.

Korobase Aulx-Gao will still be there waiting for me to subscribe. And unless a lot of the culture of the player community changes, the culture that lets players tell me “EVE Online is completely based on group play” and then say “You cannot trust anyone you meet in EVE, at all, ever” in the next Arthas-damned sentence then I expect that she’ll be waiting a long, long time.

If you do play, drop in the E-UNI channel. A number of the players there are helpful, or at least not actively malevolent. Try not to tell them where you are, though. Shoutout to Heo Hyungie, who offered to help me with the Sisters of Eve story arc and then actually did it without stabbing me in the back or anything, despite piloting a battlecruiser that could one-shot every ship I ever owned in the trial simultaneously.

Warning: There are screenshots in this post. You can use the scroll bar at the bottom to see them. At some point I’ll change it to linked thumbnails, if I figure out how and if it matters.

Astoundingly, I actually got a beta invite for Mists of Pandaria. I was expecting to get in six hours before the expansion went live.

Took me some time to download the beta installer to my steam-powered gnomish computing device, but now I have a sneak peek into the future.

Say hello to Future Me:

Future Me Screenshot. Look, Arthas, no addons!

Future Me doesn’t look much different than I do, as yet. That should be a geist with me, as I’m having issues with minor glyphs, but I guess they haven’t added the new graphics yet.

I also made a couple of monks, a Blood Elf because I am intimately familiar with the Blood Elf starting zones, and a panda because I’m not. Let me post a couple more enormous screenshots:

Don't worry! I am so keeping you, Moodytestmnk!

The Pandaren models are good. Really good. And with the face/skin/hair previews, character customization, though not nearly where I’d like it to be, is a lot nicer than Cataclysm.

Went ahead and made a panda, because why not.

OMG NOW YOU'VE SPOILED EVERYTHING

So far I haven’t found any bugs that weren’t already reported, and it is a testament to gnomish engineering that my panda can move in the horribly, awesomely crowded pandaren starting zone.

Going to try to level my BE as tank and my panda as heals or maybe just questing. As alll my nascent Brewmaster can do at this point is hurl kegs, and I hear that lowbie monk healers have one expensive heal on cooldown, I reserve the right to change my mind on this.

I’ll also work on the new Unholy tree talents and let you know what I think.

It’s official, the Mist of Pandaria beta is dropping very soon, if it hasn’t already. Here’s the official announcement.

Be sure and read the FAQ. While their stated goal is to get everyone with an annual pass into the Mists of Pandaria beta, it will depend on when you got the Annual Pass and how long you’ve been in WoW. I should be getting my beta invite about a week before MoP goes live.

So, with the recent SW:TOR free trial weekend, I decided to finally give it a shot. After all, $60 is a good amount of money (more since gold farming is illegal and it’s hard for me to earn money in your World). I decided to start a Force-user and a non=Force-user in each faction and level them up to 10 before the trial ended.

And, I didn’t make it. I got everyone a companion and off the starting planet, though. And, unfortunately, I didn’t have trial time left for screenshots.

There may be spoilers head. I’ll try to be general and vague, but You Have Been Warned.

Getting to Know You: Character Generation

The customization is somewhere between WoW and RIFT. While you don’t have the wonderful facial customization of RIFT, the body styles, customizations, accessories, and colors available are much better than Warcraft. As a recent, cutting-edge game, I would expect nothing less.

I did notice, because I notice these things, that the Twi’lek models seemed to be more chesty for their body type than cyborg or human models. Could have just been the clothing though. I initially thought about making a female toon of every body type and species and comparing, but decided that was crazy.

The initial cinematics that introduce you to your faction are awesome. They don’t beat you over the head with them though, although I kinda would have liked species-specific cinematics. I’ve seen all the movies, a good chunk of Clone Wars, and read a number of the Star Wars books and I have no idea who many of these people are supposed to be.

First Ten Levels: The Good, The Aggravating, and the Ugly

So, I spent most of the trial madly trying to level my four toons up to level 10 each. I thought the experiences would be very similar for the different types, but they turned out to be very different.

The Good: The Bounty Hunter

I honestly expected not to like the bounty hunter, but I had a great time leveling her. While some of the abilities were kind of incongruous – “rocket punch” when I didn’t have a jetpack – I certainly felt like a tough bounty hunter playing her.

But.

I turn out to be an awful, awful bounty hunter. I only managed to kill one of the people I was sent out to murder. In fact, by always keeping my word and by finding the worst ways to damage my employer’s enemies, I wound up being pretty strongly Light Side.

This is going to be a theme.

The Aggravating: Jedi Consular, Sith Inquisitor

When it came to my Force users, I started having some problems.

I didn’t find the Sith Inquisitor storyline engaging at all. I figured I’d play my slave forced into the Silth as a, well, slave forced into the Sith – outwardly compliant, but obeying orders absolutely literally and sabotaging her superiors whenever possible.

This netted me a surprising amount of Light Side points. Even flat-out lying to my superiors as I systematically destroyed their plans didn’t shake the Light Side point giveaway. Sure, being a brutal, murdering thug would have racked up the Dark Side points, but subtly setting up one’s adversaries apparently doesn’t. This keeps up, I won’t get the Sith red-eye.

Come to think of it, the Dark Lord whose apprentice I wind up being doesn’t have the Sith red-eye either. Huh.

As far as my Jedi Consular goes, I liked her story. The implications of her story, however, are either hilarious or disturbing, depending on your outlook. The Jedi Temple and grounds are besieged by Flesh Raiders, evil cannibals trying to destroy the Jedi. You find out early on that the Flesh Raiders are the original inhabitants of the planet, and they’ve been fighting for twenty thousand years.

No one, however, seems to know what they’re upset about. Huh. Let’s think about that one.

Also, technology doesn’t seem to have advanced much over the last twenty thousand years – droids are still droids and their programming is recognizable and not too much different. Computers are recognizable and compatible – the Jedi must be able to abrogate Moore’s Law. Think of the changes in computing technology over the past twenty years – Arthas, the past five! – and try to imagine it staying stagnant for longer than people have had agriculture.

So, swallowing that, we’re sent out to whip up on the Flesh Raiders, which racks up the Light Side points, and try to stop the madman from getting the pilgrims to whip up on us, because him doing to everyone what we did to the natives is Evil and Must Be Stopped. But where do I get my Dark Side points? By covering up for a pair of lovers and lying to my superiors about it. Note that this is pretty much the same thing that got my Sith some Light Side points. I’m sure that this makes sense to someone.

The Ugly: Republic Trooper

So at last we come to my plucky Republic Trooper. And she had better be plucky, for all kinds of adversity awaits her. I would think that Bounty Hunter and Smuggler would be opposites, but apparently the Trooper is the opposite of the Bounty Hunter. Opposite in more than one way, because as easy as the Bounty Hunter was, the Trooper was a miserable exercise in sheer bloody-mindedness.

I must have missed a bunch of side-quests or something.I could progress through the storyline, but it took me hours of pulling, separating mobs, getting killed, and running back. It took me the longest to level my Trooper, and nine hours were spent on the final fight of one of the last quests.

I even went back and leveled up, and it was still that hard.

Wrapping Up

So, did I enjoy SW:TOR? Yes, I did. Would I buy it? I certainly wouldn’t mind playing it, but as of yet I’ve only gotten the smallest glimpse – I haven’t tried an instance, I didn’t get far enough to see the space combat, and I have no idea what the endgame is like.

Maybe I would if I had concentrated all my effort into one character – I expect my Bounty Hunter would have wound up being my main – but I wanted to get an idea of more than one class.

Still open on this one. If we had thirty hour days I’d be more interested, but I just don’t have time.

So I unlocked the Guardians of Hyjal dailies to get that last faction to Exalted without having to grind dungeons for it.

This may have been in error.

Not the whole “fighting for the forces of life against those who would destroy it” thing. The feelings of being on the wrong side are lessening, and this worries me. No, it’s that the druids are so, well, vitalist.

I’m not unfamiliar with them. I have even spent time among the Tauren honoring their Earthmother. This is different. I haven’t spent a lot of time in protracted battle alongside druids before and, well, they react to the stress of battle…oddly.

Case in point. One of them gives me a jar of salve and sends me out to heal the injured. Odd choice, but I keep my ghoul from eating the vial and set out. Now I don’t know what is in that salve or perhaps it was mere gratitude but when I’d heal one of the druids, male or female, Tauren or Night Elf, they’d often promise to “look me up after the battle” for a “special thank you” and I don’t think they’re talking about standing me to a round of drinks at the tavern.

Okay, maybe I’m reading too much into that. But that sappy sweet dryad is hanging around, and she wants me to go pry morsels, err, bear cubs out of the trees. I’ve learned to tune her out lest her prattle drive me mad, so she surprised me by THROWING HER ARMS AROUND ME AND BURYING MY FACE IN HER BREASTS. No, really. It was in the quest text and everything. And I am short and slender and those things are enormous. It was like drowning in forest-scented pillows, except that I don’t have to breathe.

I think the living have forgotten that I’m an animated corpse. Will I forget it too? If I keep doing this, will I lose myself in their simple, vitalist gratitude and do things that we will all regret later? It’s a mark of how far I’ve fallen already that these questions actually occur to me to ask.

Seems like I was just getting 4.1 down when 4.2 comes along. We’re helping the Guardians of Hyjal invade the Firelands and take the fight to Ragnaros.

Expect fire. Lots and lots and lots of fire. Fire that is on fire, with the threat of still more fire. Ragnaros has one trick, and he beats it to death with a rock that is on fire.

Good news this patch, we have Guardians of Hyjal dailies to grind that rep for you completists. Bad news, we have Guardians of Hyjal dailies for you to grind Marks of Hyjal with. You need something over six hundred of them to get everything unlocked.

Also, Hungering Cold got nerfed with a cast time and Glyph of Dark Succor got nerfed by only working for 20 sec after a kill that grants experience or honor. Farewell, awesome self-healing.

That’s where I am this patch. I may or may not grind for the mount, but so far I’m not bored with the new content.

Going into 4.1, it’s plain to see that the developers have addressed the complaints about the length and difficulty of the Cataclysm heroics. Unfortunately for the critics, they chose to do so by making Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub even longer and more difficult. My guildies have described them as five-man raids, which I haven’t heard since we were beating our heads on the brand-new Cataclysm heroics…or wiping on Loken back in the dim and misty WotLK beginnings of the guild.

I haven’t been able to use my new battle rez yet, as the only thing that I was in that people acually died in was a speed Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run, and I had lost the tank and was busy offtanking some mobs with my DPS gear and spec. I’m really going to have to go back to Elitist Jerks and see what’s up with the theorycrafting – I seem to be taking way more damage. Enough that I finally hotkeyed Death Strike to use as a self-heal. The only thing I can think of to do to improve my survivability is drop into Blood Presence – and won’t my tank just love that?

Speaking of tanking, fool of a Moody spent Justice Points on heirlooms instead of tanking gear, so between that and my normally atrocious relationship with the RNG, I haven’t tanked anything but regular Cataclysm dungeons. Also haven’t been doing much raiding and I miss it. When things get better, my DPS spec should be as close to pre-raid BiS as I’m likely to get, and I can certainly pull the PS numbers when I need to.

Looking forward to trying for the new mounts. I’d like to get my hunter alt the tiger, as she’s still butthurt over having to faction change and losing her lovely nightsaber to an ugly green chicken. As for me, for now, I’m still pretty happy with the Kor’kron Annihilator.

So, I’ve heard a lot about RIFT, pro and con, but I didn’t want to talk about it until I had tried it for myself, and having missed the beta I thought the chances were low…until a helpful Twitter friend of mine (thanks @Brigwyn!) provided me with a trial code for the Allies of Ascended free weekend offer.

With my brand-new code in hand I set out to explore the war torn-world of Telara, as best I could. The first thing I noticed was that the graphics, even in Low Rendering Mode on my gnomish computing device, were very pretty. The Guardians area (what I could see of it looking desperately for Brigwyn and other Rift Riders) was marble and glowy and very cathedral, while the Defiant areas (what I saw of them looking desperately for guildies) were very Myst and almost steampunk in elements.

I spent a good long time creating and deleting characters. The customization was…well, I certainly enjoyed the control over my appearance, facial structure, and hair color, but the only slider I found to change my body was height, and it basically seemed to be a choice between “fashion model” and “Playboy centerfold”. Striking a balance between height and curves, I first attempted to replicate something I’m very familiar with in WoW: a death knight.

The class system is, as far as I know, unique. It reminds me of nothing so much as it does Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons. You have four main classes, or callings: Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, or Mage. Each of these classes has numerous sub-classes (or souls as the game calls them) for tanking, healing, DPS, or PvP, each with its own unique talent tree. You can (and as far as I can tell, must) have three souls for your calling, and how you place the talent points that you gain as you level is up to you.

At first, contemplating the closest I could get to a death knight, I tried Reaver/Void Knight/Paladin. This gave me diseases and DOTs, self-buffs and healing, and resistance to magic. You do get a short tutorial as you accumulate the souls for your calling, and the hints are very good.

But. Here is where I started running into the limits of the trial account. Limits, I may add, that were not mentioned when I started the account or downloaded the client.

I could only level up to 15th level. Nowhere was this mentioned. I was stuck in the starting area, with again no warning until I spent ten minutes trying to get through an invisible wall for a quest. Couldn’t whisper players, find guild members, or join groups except for public ones. I was never able to try out an instance, but I’m guessing from the experience that I wouldn’t have been able to. This was one mark against Trion and RIFT and in my mind a fairly substantial one.

I understand that it was a trial account, and there’s an applicable saying about gift horses. Nevertheless, some warning regarding these limits, in clear language not a legalese TOS and/or EULA, would have been appreciated. Like, on the page where we download the patcher, above the Download button.

At any rate, tiring of my now-maxed, umm, an effective shorthand to describe character classes is difficult… well let’s call her a R/VK/P, I decided to try something different. I rolled a rogue – and not just a rogue, a bard. And this time, I decided to put as many points as I could into one soul first, then fill out the other two later.

Big difference. A bard is apparently the rogue healer and buffer support person, and although the site warns you that a bard alone is in big trouble, I found that the few points that I was forced to take in Riftstalker (the rogue tanking class(!)) and Assassin had me doing respectable damage, while my songs healed myself for as much as I was damaging the mobs. While my R/VK/P was cursing Arthas’ name every time a rift opened nearby – and because of the current world event, this was every few minutes – my bard would think nothing of running up, joining the public group, targeting the biggest baddie, and singing everyone healthy until it died.

One last nitpick. The armor. Specifically, the armor for female characters. I know we like to look attractive, and I know this has been complained about before – but when full steel hauberks magically transform into little chainmail looks-like-someone-forgot-underpants RenFetish outfits, you’re going to hear complaints, and those complaints are well-deserved. If you want to take any size chunk out of Blizzard’s fanbase, Trion, and your ads certainly suggest that you do, treating women worse than Blizzard does is not the path to take. In all fairness, the Defiants do have a strong female lead who is too busy with averting the destruction of Telara to worry about romance, and I found this refreshing. Blunted, slightly, by the fact that she was wearing a plate bikini smaller than mine when we had this conversation.

In all there are strong points for RIFT, the story, class system, and customization balanced by strong problems, namely the lack of communication, the class system, and the platemail centerfold clothing. I’t have to say that the balance is, on the whole, towards the good. The good things about RFT are very good, and the bad things are at least fixable.

With my budget, I won’t be leaving Azeroth for Teluria any time soon – though RIFT would make a good backup game (beating Champions Online) should I ever be able to afford to purchase a copy and game time.

Oh yes, Rift runs very well in Linux using Wine and the DiretX 9 from Winetricks. Don’t install DirectX 9 from the RIFT installer.

With Raise Ally being changed to a combat rez on the PTR, I’d like to talk about something we’re going to get called on more as DPS – even if that doesn’t go through. I’d like to talk about utility.

By utility, I mean things that we do in combat that are not DPS. As crowd control and planning become more important, getting the most out of our utility will be just as important, and in some fights more important than maximizing our dps.

The closest thing we have to crowd control is Hungering Cold. It has no range, costs 40 runic power, is deep enough in the Frost tree that you have to be Frost specced to have it, and for all that only lasts ten seconds. It does infect targets with Frost Fever though, slowing them somewhat, but we are not a crowd control class.

We have two slows, however. Chains of Ice will cost you a Frost rune, but will slow the target by 60%. That’s our go-to snare. It will infect the target with Frost Fever and Ebon Plague if you have it. Our other slow is Desecration, in the Unholy talent tree. Fully talented, it creates a zone that slows enemies by 50% and lasts 20 seconds whenever you use Plague Strike, Scourge strike or Necrotic strike. Always. Great for the fight against Arthas, and your Grim Batol group will love you and put you on adds, but you can’t not do it, which will make repositioning the boss a pain in the ass for the tank.

Our main utility in a group is interrupts – understandable, as we were intended, originally, to be anti-caster melee tanks. Our bread-and-butter interrupt is Mind Freeze, which Frost DKs can cast for free with Endless Winter, but costs the rest of us 20 runic. It has a ten-second cooldown, so will be the interrupt that we use the most.

Strangulate is a silence that interrupts for 3 seconds on non-player targets. Two minute cooldown, but no runic or rune costs. Also, people tend to forget that Death Grip also interrupts when used in mid-cast. Plus, us Blood Elves get Arcane Torrent, yet another interrupt/silence that gives us nearly enough runic for a Mind Freeze and doesn’t have to be targeted.

I like to start with an Arcane Torrent as my first interrupt, as I may not have the runic for a Mind Freeze. Mind Freeze is second, then alternate with Strangulate and watch my cooldowns. I try to keep Death Grip in reserve for emergencies, as that will have the target attacking me for 3 seconds and an immune target won’t be interrupted.

Now, where in all this will we fit Raise Ally? Seriously – when we have our battle rez, I see us as prioritizing the druid in the group, then the healer, then the tank. You might want to work out a battle rez order in your raid, but 5 mans shouldn’t be much of an issue. As far as successful raiding goes, anything that will prevent a wipe is fine by me – but I just can’t get my head around gaining the ability to bring others back to life.

We’re not just about topping the DPS charts, and we haven’t been since Cataclysm dropped. I’d rather be third on DPS and first in interrupts if it keeps the group from wiping. And now we’ll be able to battle-rez. I wonder when we’ll get our heals.

Back on Halloween of 2009 I tried out the free trial of Champions Online, and posted about it here. I had hardware and driver issues, the character creation was versatile but confusing, there was some weird instancing thing going on, and it came down to me not really being able to afford farting around with it.

Well, recently Champions Online went f2p – free to play, as Lord of the Rings Online and several other MMOs have done. They also touted a new character creation system, improved servers, and that free players get access to all the game content that subscribed players do.

First, I needed to download the game client. Now I know my Netherweb access can get squirrelly at times (hey, you try getting a good high-speed access plan in Northrend) but it ended up taking me a week to download the game client. I strongly urge you, should you wish to try it yourself, to download the full client from FilePlanet or Big Download as the installer you get from the Champions Online page can’t resume if there’s an issue with the download or connection.

Nevertheless, through sheer bloody-minded cussedness, I managed to get the game client installed. No popups came up on my $400 laptop warning me of the dire necessity of cutting-edge hardware. In fact, when I logged in, there was my old friend Gratuitous Cleavage Lass bouncing at me, ready for conversion.

Conversion. Yeah. The old-stile character generation is now subscriber-only or “Gold” account limited. Free accounts, or “Silver” accounts, get two character slots with more available for a micropayment. Micropayments also open up more character slots, costumes, a couple of optional adventure packs (how free players get access to the expansions), and additional equipment, but they claim it’s possible to reach endgame without spending any money.

As a Silver account, I had to convert GCL into one of the archetypes that they had available. Archetypes function much like classes in other MMOs, as a set framework of powers and abilities that increase as you level. Talents and Advantages can serve to customize these to an extent.

With a vague memory of the beatdowns that I received as a martial artist, I decided to go with Behemoth for GCL – the classic comic-book brick. Her hoverdisc turned out to cost micropayment tokens now, so I went with Flight as her travel power because why not?

I actually like the concept of the Archetypes. It was very difficult, in my previous experience, to figure out just what powers and abilities you should get as your character progressed – for the paper-and-pencil Hero System is not a level-based game. An Archetype will help me figure out how the CO game system works so that, should I decide to subscribe, a Freeform character will be a lot easier to create without spending a fortune in Resources redoing my powers (another innovation, by the way).

Gameplay was a lot easier. Though I still had to be careful about being mobbed (especially as my attacks started to do a ridiculous amount of Knockback, flinging opponents over buildings and down the block…and aggroing more baddies) and some of the instances required a combunation of grim perserverance and clever mob pulling, it did seem to go much easier this time. And suddenly, about level 14 or so, I was winning fights more than losing them.

It’s a completely different game now, and a worthy when-I-can’t-get-into-WoW backup. I may, if things go better, actually subscribe – though I’d like to see just how far I can get as a casual Silver first.

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About Death Grip my Heart

Yes, yet another crappy little WoW blog. You may also find badly misapplied Japanese cultural references and other randomness. Who am I? I am Moodyloner, level 100 Blood Elf Death Knight. I’m part of the Wreck List guild over on the Garrosh server. Mostly, I DPS and off-tank in raids. I do not want to date […]more →